1. Preheat oven low 275 degrees (or so.)
2. Boil water for pasta, add salt. Once boiling, cook pasta to taste.
3. While the water is boiling, slice garlic into an oven-safe pan, add high-quality EVOO, and a pinch of salt. (I usually use a glass bowl or baking dish.)
4. In garlic and EVOO, slice in green olives, slice in avocado (thin), place in oven. Heat through (do not bake or cook or boil--just get good & hot.)
5. Drain pasta quickly--keep wet. Avocados should be heated all the way through at this point, if so, remove from the oven and toss the pasta is the olive oily goodness. Salt & pepper to taste. I always add red pepper flakes to my dish.

Friday, April 18, 2014

"The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the people who shaped my life. He was an old man, 87, when he died yesterday. He was always an old man to me. The first time I read Love in the Time of Cholera I was a sophomore in high school. Garcia Marquez was my first author crush. I imagined our great complicated love affair. I was 16; he was 67--it would have been so scandalous. I loved his brain. I loved the way he wove love and life and magic through wars, famine, illness, drug abuse, and death, but above all else, there was love.

I went to my shelf to find the book and it's not there. I just moved so it could still be somewhere else, but really, I'm almost certain that I gave it to someone to read. My habit is to buy the book every time I see it and hand it off to people. It's such an amazing love story. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor.

There is a hole in my heart today for the love I have, the loves I've had, and for the scandalous love affair that I dreamed of. To Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mi Amore.

Saturday, April 5, 2014

1. He always said that she would land on her feet and that no matter what happened in life, she would be okay. He was right. She is okay, but okay is not the same as happy. Not happy in the way that he might think that she would be with a perfect beautiful daughter in a space that's so nice with a husband that's a good guy, with a good-guy job, and money, and food, and no more traumas (after so many traumas.) Please, don't be a dick. She knows so well that her life could have (should have?) been much worse...after all the things that she's said and done, she may deserve less (and she should be grateful, and really, since we know her so well, she is grateful, but...). But fighting with him gave her the greatest pleasure. She loved him so unwell, although with her whole heart and she has regretted not loving him better for most of her life since then. The timing was so off that she missed the chance to say that she dearly, truly, absolutely loves him and that she's sorry that she didn't treat him better. Really, though, she's sorry that she didn't treat him the best.

And when you sit down to write a tell-all about her, please add that although she was stubborn and a huge pain in the ass (just in case no one else noticed) and that she love(d) you more than the stars and sunlight and life and air and feetinthesand/ocean and much more than fat, fat-ass kid loves cake. You were her favorite to love and fight with and she is blessed to have known you. She won't get the chance again, but this is saying goodbye for real (not in the lame 3-legged dog way that you did once.)

2. To the mentally ill but supremely lovable you.... Damn it if I haven't always (and forever) thought that I could have changed the way that you ended up, the way that you are. My narcissism and vanity is such that I (still 100% rightly) believe that if I had come to you after ECD died that we would have made the world's best celebrity crush--that we could have, would have, run the world holding hands and never looked back. [It's very possible, and maybe likely, that by this point in time, that we would have made it, and drugged it away, found it and lost it again, only to die in a similar obscurity after running through each other like two-ton-trucks on a way-too-familiar-highway each and every day of our imaginary love, but BUT, love it is and was.] And for as crazy, really and chemically and by your own will, as you are, I do deeply love you too. I would happily lose a bit of this reality to be yours again. It would be nice if you could dive deep and give up some of those nasty dark habits--I've never liked those anyway--but, life is again, short or really fucking long depending on how you look at it, and I still love you just the (fucked up) way that you are.

3. Numero Tres (Or some sort of trifecta)

Oh, to the one that was never there. To the ghost in my imagination I love (remember that almost-time in the woods?) and like and laugh with-- the fantasy still has not relinnquished, to you, the man that I almost kissed all those years ago, that I almost challenged into being my love forever...how do you plead? Is it all tattoos and e-cigs for you? (I, happily, have both now) or is there more? What kind of woman do you really want to "end up with"? The kind that will talk with you and be there, 100% in your face to say, "Oh wow, that sounds like 10,000 pounds of utter bullshit, Baby, come on!" or the other kind that makes nice for you and maps this neat way through all the shit of life just to come out the other side so super clean (and bored and restless and unknown)? You know it. I know it too. Time is the matter here, no? A matter of the old clock ticking all up in our grills. One more go around first, maybe two more lifetimes? Let me know when you're done with your marathons--with the barbies and e-cigs and dingbats, the vapid and meek and well-built, when will you be ready?